Over the last few weeks I have been asked several times about how are things moving further along with my experiment in Twitter around #0Following and since it has been a bit over a year ago when I last published an article explaining what that experiment was all about and what I was learning from it at the time, I think it’s probably a good time to do a bit of a follow-up today and explain what has happened in between. Of course, over the last few months there have been tons of things I have learned from that experiment itself, on top of what I wrote about in that specific blog entry, but there is one in particular that I enjoy the most and that is the fact that it is no longer an experiment per se, but essentially how I get the most out of Twitter itself nowadays: still heavily involved with #0Followingby relying on Public Lists, but this time around with an additional twist. Let’s see it…

Indeed, while re-reading through ‘Is Twitter Where Connections Go to Die? – The Unfollowing Experiment’ I realised that everything I had written in that article is still pretty much accurate and rather relevant, a year later, going from the initial reasons as to why I got things started with it in the first place, to evaluating plenty of the things I have learned throughout that experiment now becoming a new reality ever since, in terms of how I get to use Twitter on a daily basis. So in case you may have missed it and if you are keen on reading further along how it all started and what kind of impact it has had so far in yours truly, that article would still be a really good start on this particular topic.

However, there has been a good number of new different things I have learned that I would want to include in this follow-up blog post, perhaps as an opportunity to reflect myself on how Twitter has managed to change some of my habits as well as myself, but also to share some additional insights with everyone out there who may be interested in pursuing a similar experiment and find out, beforehand, what to expect and maybe evaluate whether they should be jumping the shark, just like I did, or maybe not, just yet.

So I thought that for this particular follow-up I will go ahead and share a number of different new items I have learned about over the course of time, with a short blurb describing them as well, of course, and see where we will end up. One thing I can share with you all is that once I have seen the light of a much smarter way of using Twitter through public lists alone it’s rather tough to go back to anything else for that matter, so I haven’t. Now, mind you, this system of #0Following works for me, and not necessarily for all of you out there. So this blog post is not intended, at all, as an opportunity for me to convince you all about how you should use Twitter from here onwards. On the contrary, it’s an opportunity for me to showcase how else can Twitter be used for, eventually, and to judge for yourselves whether it’s a system that could work for you all or not. Nothing else. I know I am benefiting from it tremendously, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it would have the same effect with you, unless, of course, you give it a try for a good few weeks and then decide to stick around with it, if at all. For now, it’s just my overall user experience of how I get to use Twitter on a daily basis, so please do take this article with a pinch of salt or two as well. So, let’s go ahead and do it!

Open Direct Messages: By far, it’s one of my favourite capabilities from Twitter, as it allows everyone out there with a Twitter ID to reach out to me, via a direct message, without having to worry whether we follow each other or not. It just works, pretty much like some other traditional tools we have been using for decades, like *cough* email *cough*. So that need to follow someone so that they can send you a direct message is no longer there. It’s a window of opportunity into starting off a conversation without having to worry too much about additional quirks. It’s even easier than using email itself, because in order for me to send you one I would need to know your email address, whereas with Twitter I just need to know your name. From there onwards I can reach out and get the conversations going, whether through the public timelines or privately, through direct messages. Just fire away!

I stilluse my main three public lists: Collaborators, Cooperators and People I Learn From. What has changed over the course of the last few months though is that I have become more ruthless with that task known as Twitter Hygiene, so ever now and then, roughly about once a month, to be more precise, I go through each of the lists and I do a very thorough and exhaustive exercise of questioning (to myself) whether a certain contact should stay in that particular list or not, or whether I may need to move it out due to the lack of interactions over the course of time.

Yes, those three lists, as you may have noticed already, have got a proximity rule in terms of importance to me, in the exact same order I have mentioned above. So, over time, there is always a chance I may decide to move folks from one list to another, or drop them altogether!, if I sense they don’t fit there well anymore. It comes and goes, as I am pretty sure it happens with all of you who as well may be using Twitter extensively. For me though that housekeeping activity has become a regular habit and I like it a lot as it helps me make sense of why I add people at all to those lists in the first place and I keep questioning myself time and time again to ensure those lists as worth the effort following further along for my own learning activities.

Which brings me into the next item; something that I noticed was not happening much before is that now that I’m adding people into those public lists I do get to check out every single new follower I may get as an opportunity for me to try to figure out where I can place them, whether in any of the three already existing public lists or maybe on a private one. This is something I have found really interesting as part of this initiative, because when asking people about where I should place them, whether Collaborators, Cooperators or People I Learn From, to help me better understand where our potential conversations may well take us, the usual response I get is this one: silence!

Ouch! Not very helpful. So I, eventually, decided to create a new private list (accessible only to me) that I call Weak Tieswhere I add those folks. Then I usually spend about a month observing, watching, reading, learning about what they tweet about and at that point if I don’t know exactly where I could place them in the 3 public lists I just drop them out altogether and never come back. That list has gotten pretty big over the course of months with over 200 people at the moment, but, like I said, it’s some kind of temporary home for those folks I just can’t figure out where to place them from the start. Yes, I know, it would help me tremendously if next time I ask that question again I would get an answer, but it doesn’t happen often enough, unfortunately. Yes, I can understand how some people may be a bit shy initially, but then again why follow someone on Twitter if you are not very willing to converse. Just to lurk around? Hummm … maybe we need to re-discover the power of a tweet to reach out and connect, don’t you think?

People keep subscribing themselves to those public lists: This is perhaps one of the most rewarding things I have learned from this experiment the entire time, more than anything else, because, just like I mentioned back then, it gives me the perfect opportunity to expose my several timelines and allow others to benefit from those folks tweeting along, just as much as I do myself, which is pretty neat if you come to think about the effort and energy put together to curate those lists accordingly. Right at this moment, there are over 50 people subscribed to any of those three given public lists, and I am sure, as I get to tweak them further, there will be more folks coming along. Best perk of it all? It’s that it allows me to also be open to other people’s public lists and subscribe to them accordingly as another social gesture of gratitude for their time AND attention.

The number of followers hasn’t changed much in over a year tanking in, pretty much, at 12,250 followers, confirming, once again, no-one ever reads Twitter anymore, nor checks it on a regular basis, because vast majority of people still haven’t unfollowed me accordingly after I unfollowed them. Either they may not have noticed, or they can’t be bothered, or both. What I find really really interesting from this statistical item is that those folks who I have followed before the longest time (in the years!) are the ones who are still there, while the more recent followers, as soon as they find out I don’t reciprocate, they just unfollow again and move on. Twitter has been there for over 10 years and it looks like some good old habits never die, do they? The power of knowing or the power of not knowing influenced both by our ability to be patient enough to stick around or not and see what we may have to offer each other.

I know some folks have suggested in the past that just like I decided to unfollow everyone, I should also make my Twitter account private, so those 12,250 people would drop out altogether as well and could start clean as well. I thought about it for a while and then I realise it wasn’t really going to work very well because the moment I make my Twitter account private, that’s the moment I am locking myself out, because in order for me to receive DMs I’d need to follow those folks back again and I would need to approve their following once more, becoming rather impractical over time. So at this point I just leave it down to people to unfollow as they may see fit. What has been really refreshing to see though is how the number of public lists I used to be part of has increased nicely month after month resulting in plenty of other folks giving it a try as well and see how it would work, although some of them haven’t jumped into the next level of unfollowing everyone, which is just fine. One step at a time, I suppose.

Conversations are ever so much more relevant and meaningful: indeed, because, in a way, I’m forcing a hard stop when I trigger conversations starters based on what people tweet that may have piqued my interest. It’s a pretty intriguing phenomenon, because, if anything, it confirms how little people use Twitter nowadays to engage in conversations vs. just broadcasting further along their own marketing messages, before they move on to the next thing, whatever that may well be. I keep getting told, as a result, they find that dialogue rather engaging, but shocking at the same time since it’s been months, if not years!, when they last exchanged a round of tweets with someone else, which I guess is just the reaffirmation I needed to justify why I got things started with this experiment in the first place.

One of the activities I have noticed that has increased tremendously over time with my use of Twitter using publics lists has been that one of active listening to what people tweet. I could spend entire days where I won’t share a single tweet across, and yet I would get to read every single tweet that comes through any of those publics lists. It’s fascinating being part of those global conversations, but without you speaking up, just watching and observing how people behave and say the things they say, listening with intent, learning something new, reflecting further along on what just happened, and, as a result, reuse it accordingly for additional conversations at a later time.

Right now, it’s one of my favourite Twitter activities: resist the urge to raise my voice with just another tweet and instead listen to what people have to say and venture into figuring out why people tweet what they tweet during those times of the day. It’s a fun exercise, I tell you, if anything, because it also helps you tame your own insatiable beast always rather keen on oversharing everything with everyone specially about topics you think you know better than everyone else! I tell you, I can highly recommend it. I’d say I’m spending probably a lot more time nowadays just listening than engaging myself in some kind of Twitterrhea as much as I used to.

That’s also probably part of the reason why curation has become a huge thing for yours truly. The fact I’m reading a whole lot more tweets than ever before allows me to find tons of pretty interesting articles, blog posts, reports, white papers and whatever other kind of publication from those I follow through lists that I then share across in a private Slack space I have set up specifically for that purpose: acting as my Personal Knowledge Hub of interesting links and tweets I have bumped into over time that I would want to either re-read again or reuse elsewhere at a later time.

We are coming close to the end of the year and I have already over 19,000 items accumulated. That may explain as well why plenty of the blog posts I have written in the last few months have got such overall rich linking activity, compared to previous years. And that’s something I am enjoying quite a bit, as it allows me to explore plenty of content I wasn’t even aware of from before, even if people don’t check for pingbacks / trackbacks anymore (Oh, boy, I miss those good old days of blogging conversations back and forth, and you?).

Because I now have an opportunity to read more tweets from people I add into my lists, it allows me to connect the dots much more effectively, so over time I have become a huge fan of Group Direct Messages to introduce people I am interested in learning more from and apply what is known as ‘closing of triangles’. Essentially, when I read tweets from a couple of people who are sharing similar stuff, but who may not know each other, I’m a whole lot more proactive nowadays in wanting to make those connections, i.e. connect the dots, as I have mentioned above, and get them together. As a result of such activity we get involved in rather intense (private) conversations of really excited and passionate people who are interested in similar topics and who would want to learn plenty more about them through that dialogue! As an opportunity to use Twitter this way, that is, a learning and networking tool, it’s just brilliant!

No spam, even with open DMs: This is really refreshing, and quite a relief, frankly. If I judge by the huge amount of spam I used to get in the past from Twitter, never mind from other media tools, this is one of the things I am most grateful about. Here’s an example: when was the last time you followed someone and right away, within a matter of minutes, you get an auto-direct message from them asking you to either follow them in other media tools or perhaps check their Web sites. Hallo? Sounds familiar? Well, I bet it does! That doesn’t happen when you add people into lists heh

And that’s just an example, amongst several others. Somehow, ever since I started using lists exclusively I seem to have gone under the spam radar to the point of not seeing anything coming through at all. Nice!

Resisting the urge to automation: Nowadays, you may have noticed how vast majority of folks who are using Twitter, specially, power users, have jumped the shark making use of automation to publish tweets at specific times within their own schedules, or share retweets of their own content to resurface again into everyone’s timelines, or just simply automate certain social gestures so that it helps them maintain a certain presence even though they may not be there anymore. I am pretty sure you may have experienced such automatisation of how people use Twitter, or perhaps you may be doing some of that yourself.

The thing is that with #0Following there isn’t a single chance for me to automate my Twitter presence, and I quite enjoy that. You only get me, with all of my own perfections and imperfections, but still me, the human being. No machines involved. It’s my opportunity to keep Twitter human, social, even more so when bots seem to have taken it by storm to the point where they are even more active than we are. In a way, if you come to think about it, there is a great chance than when you tweet along you may be interacting with bots and you may not know it, nor realise it, till it’s perhaps too late.

The thing I have learned with this particular initiative is that sometimes it is good not to be there, to show you are human and that you don’t live in Twitter 24x7x365, because there might be other much more important things to do than showing you are there, even when we all know you aren’t. For me, at least, it is down to when I tweet, I am there, it’s the real thing, no automation, just myself, and somehow I quite like that living in the moment feeling, even within Twitter. Now, wouldn’t it be great if Twitter would have an indicator of automated tweets, or an early sign you are about to engage with a bot just before that tweet goes out?

No bullying, trolling or hate speech, specially, involving a certain footballer, come through anymore. Before, when I used to follow people and had open DMs, I used to have some of the least interesting, colourful, foul tweets one can imagine, to the point where I ended up in a frenzy of blocking people like never before. It was crazy! I don’t know what happened though afterwards, but ever since I starting using just public lists all of that vitriol is now gone. For good! In fact, I can’t remember a single tweet exchange in over 14 months that involved any kind of behaviour associated with bullying, trolling, hate speech and what not. Oh, boy, judging from all the news items you keep reading on this topic, isn’t that rather comforting or what? Knowing you are heading back to Twitter and all of that foul discourse is missing entirely from the different timelines you may be interested in at that point in time. W00t!

Despite 14 months since I have embarked on this no longer an experiment but initiative as to why I use Twitter the way I use it today with public lists, I still find I need to justify and explain to people myself why I still do it, as almost everyone out there is rather surprised and intrigued about why I have been doing it for so long, beyond proving the point it can be done, to how I can be such an active AND interactive twitterer when I don’t follow anyone back.

That’s why I added in my Twitter bio a link to the blog post explaining the experiment in detail. That seems to have stopped people questioning or wondering why I’m doing this. I know now I should have included it right from the very beginning and it would have saved me tons of typing across the board here and there. All good now though, I have learned from that experience if I ever embark on a new experiment or initiative a link in my Twitter bio to explain things further along will always be helpful. Alas, you will run out of characters pretty soon! Yikes! Anyway, don’t think there will be many new changes coming along in this regard from yours truly, so it may take a while before I need to updated it again.

More self-aware of how I use Likes(❤️) not just to like stuff, but love stuff that comes through my Twitter Lists, which is terrific, because it helps me amplify certain social gestures along the flair of caring for what people have got to say and share a token of my gratitude to compensate for that tweet exchange or interesting insight or relevant links shared across. The fact that Like then gets retweeted into my timeline is just an additional perk I appreciate quite a lot, if anything, because some times people find it a bit surprising altogether the kinds of things I ❤️.

I mentioned on the original blog post how my favourite Twitter client to work with listsonlywas Tweetbot, either on iOS or Mac. Over a year later, that’s still the case. In fact, I am now in v4 of Tweetbot for iOS and I still think it’s the most powerful Twitter client for mobile out there in the market. And on the Mac, the desktop app is just as good! Another reason why I treasure Tweetbot a great deal is that it doesn’t have all of the new distracting capabilities from Twitter that don’t add up much overall into the value add of the whole microblogging concept, which is pretty neat, because it just helps me focus on the conversations themselves and ignore everything else.

Ohhh, and did I tell you about its wonderful Mute button capability? That one that allows you to mute, within the app itself, not only bullying people trolling you around, but their tweets, as well as hashtags, certain keywords and other Twitter services put in place? Gosh, I love that mute button, I tell you. It’s one of my favourite features by far! Seriously, if you are looking for a client that would help you tame the noise of unwanted people and their tweets, including Twitter services and hashtags, Tweetbot is as good as it gets, for real!

(Web) Celebrities’ nonsense: Many months have now gone by and I still get a bit ticked off when people with thousands of followers and them following many other thousands more keep following, unfollowing, following and unfollowing you (and on and on and on) hoping to trick you to become another number to count for in their vanity metrics. My goodness! What a nuisance!

I am really sorry to write this, but I have started to develop that healthy habit of blocking those people and keeping them away from my timeline. If all you are looking for is my attention, I’m not going to give you such luxury. You will blocked the moment you engage in such ill behaviour. Besides all of that, I still find it really hard to believe they do anything else other than broadcasting their own marketing mumbo-jumbo about how cool they are for hanging out with the cool kids versus engaging with the @lonelyboy15s in different conversations. Time is precious AND is a finite resource, so I lost the ability to tolerate such behaviour of only caring about you and your numbers. No, thanks! Like I said, you will be blocked!

That also means that, over time, I have become something I never expected that would happen in this day and age of me, me, me where vanity seems to have killed the social media star. Indeed, ever since I started up this experiment that then turned itself into how I use Twitter on a daily basis, I have found out I’m easily ignored out by everyone else, helping me go by days and days unnoticed, as if I didn’t exist and while I know plenty of people would feel uncomfortable with that feeling I’m loving it. Why? Well, a simple word really to explain it all: freedom. No attachments. No exceptions. No expectations.

I know that this may sound a bit too cold from my side, but, believe me, it isn’t. It’s just a confirmation that the most intimate conversations / dialogue have now moved on into niche networks, typically closed. I guess that’s what happens when we continue to live in a constant state of surveillance (and approval) created by everyone else. That’s why we have a tendency to find new, comforting havens where we can hang out at ease without having to pretend or watch what we say out there. Remember groupware back in the good old days? Does it ring a bell why there is just such a massive uptake for messaging or chatting apps or apps like Snap with a rather unique proposition around sharing private, ephemeral content? Yes, I know, it’s the Web we are building today, although it’s not much different than what it was 20 years ago as far as our habits and behaviours are concerned, except, perhaps, it’s a different cycle altogether proving we may not have learned much in the last two decades, and counting …

An act of rebellion at its best! Something I didn’t think I needed back in the day when I got things started, but that over time it’s transformed itself into an opportunity for me to become, once again, an outlier, the weird one, the rebellious one (with or without a cause!) highlighting how there may well be other more effective and engaging ways of connecting, learning, collaborating and sharing our knowledge with others, but that we may not have discovered just yet. Pretty much like I did with #noemail, or when deleting my Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, or when I decided to return back to blogging at the risk of spending a lot less time in media tools and see what would happen, while everyone else is heavily involved with becoming the new media,

Refusing to become the media: Yes, while everyone is attempting to become the new media, as mentioned above, that is, the centre of attention with those 15 minutes of Internet fame, I keep running away from it like the plague. You know, I have been online on the Internet since early 1997 and over the course of those two decades I have learned many things, but one in particular got stuck in my head very very early on in the day and I still get to practise it every day: never ever talk online about politics, religion or sports.

And guess what’s happening in Twitter nowadays? Yes, I know, I once said that Twitter is the ‘Pulse of the Planet’ and, as such, it’s becoming indispensable, but then again if you look into what Twitter was, say, 5 or 10 years ago, you would notice how all of those three themes I have just mentioned above have taken over everything that made Twitter a shiny new star of what was possibleto make this world a better place for everyone. And much to our collective regret, Twitter has become nowadays the shining star to showcase our many various different dysfunctions as a global society.

Twitter is currently mastering how dysfunctional our diverse cultures may well be, regardless of wherever you may well be in the world. And because we enjoy that morbid sense of ‘you are always wrong, while I am always right and I am going to prove it!’ Twitter itself refuses to do anything about it, because that’s where vast majority of its income comes from nowadays: our very own miserable and meandering experiences demeaning others.

Yes, I refuse to become the new media. I refuse to think that all of these media tools are only good at overexposing our own misbehaviours, ill conducts, foul speech, hatred and what not. In the case of Twitter, for instance, it’s not the once rather tolerant, inclusive, understanding, diverse, empathic and caring Twitter I used to know, which is why you would understand now why I am ruthless nowadays in building Twitter lists that have got other purposes beyond that hate speech. It’s the connecting, the reaching out, the learning, the working together, the collaborating effectively in changing this world that still pretty much tick for me when making use of all of these social media tools and this experiment of #0Following is my attempt to do something about it.

No ego: This particular item may well be the actual big shocker from the entire experiment / initiative on its own so far, because that one died, for me, back in August last year when I first got things started with relying on public lists alone versus the vanity metrics of who follows you and who do you follow, instead. And, frankly, it’s probably the best things that could have ever happened, more than anything else because, when I use Twitter,the focus, at long last, is no longer me, me, me but the ‘we’.

Over the course of time, I realised I was starting to care more, and become even more empathic, not only about those people who have been an integral part of the lists I use, but also about the interactions, conversations and content they were sharing across, which meant that, all of a sudden, I went slow. I paused. I reflected on how and why people have a tendency to behave the way they do online through tools like Twitter. There was no longer that frenzy of trying to keep up with stuff, instead, things slow down enough that you start reading more about what others are creating and sharing across, more than anything else as an opportunity to show your appreciation for how people in your lists use Twitter and how you would want to either amplify or augment what they are doing by contributing your two cents. That’s the power of social networks, in a nutshell, when you start caring more about them than about your self, understanding that, eventually, you become the network, the network becomes you. It is just like going back to Twitter circa 2006 – 2007. Remember those good old days? I miss them, too!

And, finally, something else I have been noticing as of late that I couldn’t find an answer for, and still haven’t, just yet, to be frank, which is how this whole experiment / initiative on #0Following has now, finally, managed to burn out the potential flame of stardomI may have enjoyed from back in the day, if you know what I mean, taking me back into that wonderful place of oblivion where no-one cares anymore about you, really, either about who you are or what you do, again giving me the opportunity of enjoying a new freedom, a new clean start of deciding for myself how I would want to continue making use of social networking tools like Twitter for the next decade, as I am about to complete this one.

It’s as if all of a sudden the pressure to conform, to try to fit in, to try to please each and everyone, to keep feeding the poachers, the leeches, the takers, the selfish who only care about them and so forth is now a thing of the past. Phew! What a relief! In a way, this whole experiment now feels pretty much like a rebirth. Of what? I don’t know yet, but somehow it’s starting to feel like I am about to embark on another exciting adventure of exploration, of playful good fun, of active learning, of apprenticeship, of self-discovery, as to what do I want to do to make sense of these social networking tools, while I keep questioning whether it’s all still worth it, or whether it’s perhaps now a good time to move on and never walk back.

In short, if anything, this experiment has managed to, finally, make me question and challenge my own core beliefs (and my place within them) of what I once thought was going to help us all change this world to make it a better place through the use of social technologies not only just for me, or you, but for everyone else for that matter. Do I have the final answer to those questions? No, I don’t, but that’s what makes it all worth while to me, the uncertain path, the unknown journey, and what we learn about one another along the way, not necessarily the final destination, whatever that may well be…

Yes, I know, I do realise that this blog post may have come out a whole lot more intimate and rather poignant on its own than what I may have thought about at the beginning of it, but I suppose I needed it to come out, I needed to reflect about what I have been doing for the last 20 years since I first went online out there on the Internet, more than anything else as an indication of a potential new, clean start, with no baggage, no legacy, no ties, no additional explanations, no expectations, no nothing. Where to? I don’t know. 2017 will mark my 10th year anniversary using Twitter and I guess that’s what’s left for me to explore, whether it’s now a good time to move on to other things and leave everything behind, or whether it’s a good opportunity to stick around hoping things will turn out all right eventually.

They say that the Internet was born a few decades ago based on a couple of principles: trust and procrastination. Well, we might as well sit tight then and start working much harder so that none of those two break down, eventually, because, whether we realise it or not, whether we like to admit it or not, we may well be going through a time nowadays when we may need to start questioning ourselves for what do we want to do with the Open Social Web we once helped build back in the day but that, finally, got destroyed a great deal much to our regret and, most importantly, what can we do to make it happen, once again, and restore it to its fully glory. Because, you know, so far, we are failing big time, and I suspect that unless we all do something about it, no-one will. The final question that’s left out there for me to reflect upon and that keeps lingering around all over the place would be the following: are we up for the task to reclaim back the Open Social Web they once took away from us all?

Continuing further along with the series of blog posts for My Top 5 iOS Apps of the Week, here we are, once again, with the next round of iOS apps I would want to share across that may be worth while checking out, in case you may not have played with, nor seen, them just yet. As usual, this list of recommended apps, unless stated otherwise, would be available for both iPad and iPhone, so you can make your pick accordingly. Also, as I have mentioned in a previous entry that I will be doing from there onwards, I will be sharing along the main themes where these apps would be fitting in, so you can have a sneak peek to check what’s coming up next. So this week’s themes would be Utilities, Productivity, Healthcare & Fitness, Reference and (Social) Collaboration.

Thus without much further ado, here’s the list of recommended iOS apps for this week:

1Password: There are plenty of very good options out there to help you handle the several dozens of passwords we get to use more or less on a regular basis and, after having tried them all out for a good while, the only one that has remained installed in either of my iOS devices over the course of the years has always been 1Password. There are tons of things I enjoy about this app on its own apart from helping me remember what passwords to use for what service, but perhaps my two favourite ones would be how pervasive it is, as I can use it on either my laptop or my iOS gadgets as well as the integration with iCloud services (Or Dropbox), which means all of the passwords I may use at one given point in time are all in sync with one another and I don’t have to worry whether they are up to date or not. I just know they are. Like I said, if you would need a pretty decent and powerful password management app 1Password is the way to go!

Ulysses: If you have been reading this blog for a while now, you may have noticed how I have a tendency to be a bit too verbose with my own blog posts. I know they may well not be the ideal length, nor even the recommended one! for that matter, and I would say that there will be a couple of apps I could blame for that. Of course, I am referring to those that would allow you to focus on just writing along whatever ideas you may want to develop further without having any distractions while just focusing on that act of writing. Ulysses is one of them. In fact, at the moment, it’s my favourite one for #longread documents I would be jotting down from my iPad Pro with the Smart Keyboard.

It’s a pure delight and while there are a few others that allow you to achieve the same results (i.e. focused writing without distractions) I just keep coming back to it, specially, when I’m disconnected from the network while on the road traveling. The great thing about Ulysses, and which I haven’t put to the test just yet, although it’s coming up nice and slow, is that it has got all of the full potential to become the tool that would allow you to write (e)books effortlessly and that’s what I’m really looking forward to explore some more, although in this regard there area couple of other apps that are worthy competitors, but I will talk about them in its due time. For now, like I said, if you are looking for an app that would allow you to do uninterrupted, focused #longread writing, Ulysses does a wonderful job at it. I can strongly recommend it, in case you haven’t tried it out just yet and you happen to be as verbose as I am …

Calm [iPhone Only]: There are tons of different apps in this realm of Healthcare & Fitness that would allow you to detox, relax, take things easier, chill out, take good breaks, complete a number of different exercises and routines to make you feel more at ease with both yourself and whatever circumstances you may be going through at one particular moment, etc. etc., but the one I have been using myself for a good few years already has been Calm from calm.com. In fact, in more than one occasion it’s helped me establish a routine to fight some pretty stressful work related situations and just for that I’d be ever eternally grateful. The many relaxing ambient sounds and wonderful imagery, the different routines, exercises, themes, friendly schedules and an overall gorgeous user experience do the trick for me. I tell you, if you are out there looking for an app around mindfulness meditation with a purpose, look no further than Calm. As far as I am concerned, it’s as good as it gets, and, if you don’t believe me, take it for a spin yourself and let me know what you think.

Drippler: If you are using any iOS device out there, whether an iPhone, iPad or iPod and you would want to be informed at all times about news items, hints and tips, tricks, how tos, best deals on the App Store, and what not, Drippler is the only app you would need to have installed to enjoy all of that and so much more! I check it on a daily basis to read the recommended articles on how to get the most out of all of these iOS gadgets as well as going through the best deals to find out some other interesting and worth while checking apps that may be for sale during that day. So if you are into saving yourself a buck or two, while trying out some really cool new apps, this would be the app to use, regardless. It’s a must-have, I tell you, and your wallet will be ever so grateful to you the moment you installed it.

IBM Watson Workspace: And, finally, the one app I’m most excited about for this year. The app I have been waiting for a good few months already to make its debut out there in the market because I feel it will become a game changer over the course of just a few weeks in terms of what it has got to offer to help improve the way we communicate, collaborate, share our knowledge across and work together effectively in teams. The app itself is called IBM Watson Workspace, and while you can access it as well from your favourite Web browser in your computer, there is also a free app for it that works flawlessly in iOS devices giving you the very same user experience.

There are lots of things I could say about this particular application that just launched its pre-view beta version this week that have got me pretty excited about it, but I think I could just summarise them all with a single keyword: AI. And not necessarily AI as in Artificial Intelligence, but more specifically AI as Assisted Intelligence. If you would want to find out more about what I mean with the latter in an attempt to humanise AI, I have put together an article with the following heading that pretty much explains where all of my excitement comes from: ‘Can IBM Watson Workspace Save Our Productivity?’ Take a look into the blog entry itself and let me know what you think, whether there is a reason for us all to be thrilled about its huge potential, or not. Something tells me that it may well change not only the way we view productivity, but also the way we get teamwork done more effectively altogether not necessarily by replacing our human capability, but, on the contrary, augmenting it a great deal altogether. We shall see … I am pretty excited, I tell you, and I can’t wait to see how it would develop further over the course of the next few days, weeks, months …

And that’s it for this week, folks! Next week there will be a new round of iOS recommended apps for this series of My Top 5 iOS Apps of the Week that I will be sharing across, so stay tuned for plenty more to come along. I still have got a couple of dozen other apps I would want to talk about that I use on a regular basis, so I hope you get a chance to enjoy them just as much as I do myself. Hopefully, there will be something out there for everyone to try out and play with … So keep having fun and till next time!

If you look out there, and read carefully, you would notice how vast majority of people keep saying how AI (newest shiny object out there in the tech scene at the moment) is going to save us all from almost everything. Perhaps even ourselves! The thing is that I have always been a bit concerned about the specific role we seem to have placed upon AI to come to our rescue and solve all of our societal / business problems, even to the point of replacing our very own decision making processes, therefore becoming the newmanagers. Yet, when I come to look a bit closer and observe how most AI has been applied through algorithms into some of the media tools I rely on I despair, and more and more by the day, frankly. All of a sudden we see how our overall user experiences are bastardised when an algorithm starts acting on behalf of us, the individual human beings, assuming they know better than we do what we really want, what our needs may well be and what our decision making process should have been like without even bothering about figuring out our context in the first place.

It’s horrifying. Not necessarily because of the potential implications, but more than anything else because of the overall horrendous user experience they provide. It’s one of the main reasons as to why I deleted my Facebook account, my LinkedIn and my Google Plus Profiles; why I use Tweetbot everywhere vs. the regular Twitter Web site; why I have gone from the state of loving Instagram to loathing it more and more by the day; why every time there is a new media tool out there that comes with an algorithm I keep running away from it like the plague. I don’t want AI to decide for me what’s best, or not, for me. I don’t want AI to make me dumber by sacrificing my own privacy in exchange of convenience. You see? I don’t think that’s the role to explore the huge potential AI has got to offer in today’s world. If anything, I would want AI to make me better, smarter, and, overall, a much more effective decision maker, so that instead of replacing me and obliterating my entire thinking process, it can augment it helping me become more aware, more conscious, tolerant, diverse, empathic, caring and, overall, a better human being as a result.

Now, that’s what humanising AI should be all about, if you ask me, which is why I’m so incredibly excited about IBM’s announcement, from earlier on this week, at the World of Watson conference event, where Watson Workspace was officially launched as a pre-view beta of what the future of collaboration, knowledge sharing, learning and innovating around knowledge should be all about. Not replacing and wiping out entirely our human potential, but, instead, augmenting our capability through enhanced, trustworthy and advisory commentary from IBM Watson itself.

Welcome to the amazingly exciting world of Assisted Intelligence!

Earlier on this week, IBM announced a new product called Watson Workspace coming into play in an already rather crowded space, that is, the one around Messaging / Chatting apps with plenty of already rather solid products available like Slack, HipChat, Microsoft Teams, Spark, Circuit, RingCentral, TalkSpirit, Ryver, HiBox, Telegram, etc. etc. The list goes on and on and on. You may say they may well be a bit too late into the market, but then again no-one ever said that when Google first introduced Google Search over 15 years ago. It wasn’t the first search engine coming into the market, it wasn’t the last one either, indeed, but it transformed the way we use the Web today.

And then there is IBM Watsonitself through a superb new capability called Moments, which is, by far, what excites me the most about the application itself. Moments can best be described as, essentially, Assisted Intelligence at hard work with you and therefore helping me become smarter at what I do with what I know, without having to work harder unnecessarily. Moments is that brilliant new capability of applying cognitive computing to the way you collaborate by making your decision process much more effective keeping in your know of what’s happening while you are there, or even when you are not there. It will summarise interactions and conversations already held for you, present you with options on what you may, or may not, need to do to complete a certain ask or request, and eventually reduce all of the potential friction and clutter as to who does what, when, with whom and for what purpose.

Now, not sure what you would think about it, but that’s not only what I would call the Future of Work, but the brilliant and exciting #PresentOfWork, frankly, and I just can’t wait for Workspace to unleash its full potential by demonstrating, in a very capable manner, it is very possible to turn Artificial Intelligence into Assisted Intelligence, to no longer think about replacing the human(s) when doing (collaborative) work, but to realise the full potential of the human intellect by enhancing the way we share our knowledge across and how we collaborate to get work done more effectively, which is, eventually, what productivity has been about all along either as an individual or collective activity.

WoW, I am reallyexcited about Workspace’s present, never mind its bright future! And you?

[PS. Ok, I know, you all want to take it for a spin and judge for yourselves, right? Well, if you are interested in giving it a serious try, just either leave a comment over here below, or reach out to me on Twitter via @elsua, and I will invite you all into a space where we can play around with it. Oh, and if you would want to keep up with news items, updates, capabilities, enhancements, fixes, etc. etc. you may also want to follow IBM Watson Workspace’s Twitter ID. I just did!]

Once again, it’s that time of the week where we dive into the My Top 5 iOS Apps of the Week series and recommend further along the next round of apps I think would be worth while exploring some more for iOS devices. This blog entry is going to be one about discovery, because two of the recommended apps I will be sharing across will be about two new ones I discovered myself earlier on this week and that they got me hooked up from day one since I started using them. So that should be interesting and perhaps worth while checking out for you folks as well, who knows… At the same time I have been thinking it is probably a good idea to include some keywords about where those apps would fit in, so that you would have an opportunity to figure out, earlier on in the post, what you may be able to expect. So in this week’s Top 5 iOS Apps we have got task management, process automation, podcasting and photography.

Trello: There are a number of different task management apps I have been using over the course of the years. Some of them come and go. And others stick around for a while, even in between upgrading devices, and while I realise I will be talking about my favourite ones over the course of time, the one I’m currently using and enjoying quite a bit is Trello. There are a lot of things to like about this particular app to manage yours tasks, but the ones I enjoy the most are the reaffirmation that completing and managing tasks can well be a visually appealingactivity to the point where it will hook you up from day one and you won’t be able to escape it that easily.

It integrates fully with a whole bunch of third party apps as well, which is a really nice capability to have, but the one that makes it even worth while on its own is the integration with Slack. It’s just gorgeous and worth while trying in case you may not have just yet. And, finally, the other one thing I really like about it is how flexible it is to the point where you can hack it to achieve almost everything you would want to with it, even to the point of organising your entire life! So when using Trello the only limit I can think of is just your imagination and how you put it to work getting the creative you out of the box. In terms of flexibility very very few apps are just as good as Trello is.

Workflow: Now, I should state at this point in time that I am not very much in favour of automation per se, but you know there are times when you have got a number of different repetitive tasks or processes you need to take care of while in your iOS devices and knowing there is a superb option out there that could help out tremendously in this regard is a huge bonus. Well, that app is Workflow.

As I keep relying more and more on working mobile either with my iPhone or iPad Pro, I have developed the habit of using Workflow every time I repeat an action or a process three times, at least. That would confirm it is regular enough for me to want to automate it and save myself some time so I could do some other things. If you would want to know how the app works and how you, too, could build up those automated workflows, take a look into this short YouTube tutorial that explains how you can get things started and from there onwards let the play begin!

Overcast: You know, there are tons of people who keep saying that podcasting is back, and with a vengeance, and I, actually, think they may well be right, because this year alone I’m listening to more podcasting shows than in any other previous years. I listen to them when I exercise first thing in the morning, during work breaks, or at the end of the evening when things start to quiet down a fair bit. And I am loving it, more than anything else because of the app I’m currently using that has got me totally hooked up. It’s Overcast.

It’s got a beautiful design, the ability to sync podcasts in between devices and a really nice user interface that makes it extremely friendly to use. Too easy, perhaps, even. Oh, and I can listen to podcasting episodes streaming them out, or downloading them ahead of time before I go offline for an extended period of time, like when on a plane, which makes the perfect combination, if you ask me. Yes, I realise most podcasting applications on the desktop do all of this already and, maybe, plenty more, but, like I said, I’m mostly on iOS devices nowadays, so having Overcast as my podcasting app is just all I need heh

Polarr: Just the other day I was counting the number of different apps I’m currently using for various different purposes to process, edit, modify and enhance photos I take with my iPhone 6S Plus and it’s well over a dozen of them at the moment! Ouchie! Yes, I know, far too many! Well, that’s what it takes to go out there and start exploring all of the options, play some more and see what sticks around that fits one’s needs. I got an entire folder with just photography related apps and the list keeps growing on and on and on. So you can expect to see, in upcoming blog posts, an additional number of recommended apps around photography and how I get to tweak photos with them.

However, for this blog post, I’m going to start sharing across a recommendation for the one app I bumped into this week and which I have really enjoyed using so far, specially, on the iPad Pro. It’s called Polarr. It’s free, although if you would want to make use of an extensive list of really cool, fancy, filters and advanced capabilities you could buy those packages separately, but it’s totally worth it. The features and possibilities you have to tweak photos from applying filters, shades, colour, shapes, tilting, saturation, contrast, etc. etc. are just phenomenal, but what I like the most about the app is how easy it is to use and learn quickly about tweaking those photos, when, with other apps, a number of YouTube video tutorials were required by yours truly to make sense of some of their features. With Polarr, no need to, unless you are into the pro editing field. But if you are looking for an app easy enough to use to get some spectacular results, it’s worth while a try, for sure! And yes, no worries, in upcoming blog entries I will share some other apps I use when handling photos. Polarr itself is not the only one…

The Roll: And, finally, off we go with the last recommendation for this week’s post. And it’s another photography related app I discovered earlier on this week as well and that I’m currently loving it, because it comes to fill in a void that even iOS 10 hasn’t been able to address to the extent I would have wanted it. And I will give you an example of what I mean … The Roll is a free app that allows you ‘automatically organise your camera roll’ and in a very effective manner if I may add. It will eventually apply some AI in order to categorise the photos from your camera roll in such a way that would make you go WOW! From Your Best Photos This Week, to Your Best Photos, it will just group all of your photos according to different group names which you can access through folders and within a matter of seconds, BANG!, you can find all of the photos in your iOS devices associated with one another where it may well be fit, according to those initial groupings. Like I said, just WOW!!

But, don’t worry, there is even more! Another really really interesting and pretty neat capability is that one where from the groups of pictures that it may put together it will tell you which one would rank the highest in terms of aesthetics that would then entice you perhaps to share it across in different media tools. Very much worth while a look, I tell you. If you are crazy about taking all sorts of photos across the board and then try to make some sense of them flawlessly I can strongly recommend you take a look into The Roll, because something tells me you will like it!

And that’s it! That’s the list of My Top 5 iOS Apps of the Week for this week that I think would be worth while having a look into and see if they can make it into any of your iOS devices as well and next week there will be some more. Again, trying to keep a balance between work related apps and for personal use ones, hoping there may well be something out there for everyone to play with. Hope you enjoy them just as much as I do and get ready for next week’s!

Ohhh, and, again, if you have got an app you would want to recommend and that would be worth while trying it out, let me know, as I am always very keen on discovering new cool apps that can help me work more effectively while getting the most out of these iOS devices. Remember, after all, 2016 is the year I, finally, went mobile!

One of the things I am finding really interesting from the My Top 5 iOS Apps of the Week series of blog posts is the fact that it’s an exercise that’s helping me really evaluate how I eventually make use of either my iPhone or iPad, whether for personal, private use or whether for work, and I must admit that at this point in time there is just such a blend between the two types of apps that I no longer make a distinction for neither of them. To me, they are just apps with a job in mind to execute, and do well, and then move on to the next thing. And it’s intriguing, a fair bit, because when I was a salaried employee it wasn’t like that. I had a good number of folders, in each device, that would help me classify and organise the apps accordingly as to which ones were related to work or not. I am not too sure whether, somewhere along the way, I lost that urge to keep everything organised to the extenuation or, on the other hand, whether my freelance life has taken over helping me understand that one and the other are pretty much the same thing: me as a knowledge (Web 2.0) worker trying to remain productive AND effective while on the move!

Thus, here we go, once again, with the next blog entry in the series sharing along the different apps I enjoy making heavy use of from either device, whether iPhone or iPad. As you will be able to see for this week, there is a little bit of a blend between work and personal use related apps, so I’m hoping there will be a bit of everything for everyone. As usual, unless it’s specified otherwise, the app would work both in iPhone and iPad, so without much further ado here are My Top 5 iOS Apps of the Week – Week #4:

Box: Yes, I know there are a bunch of file sharing applications and services out there with Dropbox, perhaps, being one of the most popular ones. Alas, for me, Box is the one that pretty much hits the nail on the head and for a good couple of reasons. As a starting point, I have got two different accounts making up to 60GB of disk space, which suffices my needs pretty well without having upgraded just yet and, secondly, it’s incredibly pervasive helping me work more effectively with my documents regardless of which device I may be using, whether iPad, iPhone or MacBook Air.

Eventually, all of my files and documents are in sync, so whenever I’m on the move I know where to find that particular document for that specific client presentation and right at my fingertips. It can’t get any better than that. Oh, hang on, it does! I love how Box keeps integrating with other third part apps, specially, Enterprise Social Networking tools which makes it extremely easy for everyone to work with documents while inside the ESNs themselves. It’s like an extension of the capabilities already offered but with a better opportunity of making sense of the documents you are currently working on, because that’s the only thing you can do with Box, effective social file sharing.

Paper: With my iPad Pro and my Apple Pencil Paper is, by far, the single app I enjoy the most for a good number of different productivity related activities, going from Note Taking (Although I use a few other apps in this realm that I will be talking about over the course of time), to sketching, to doodling or just simply try to get out some of my crazy ideas into whatever the visual that comes along, if at all. It’s just such an amazing app that even I, someone who doesn’t even have a single skill for drawing anything, can get something done with it! With a bit of time, and tons of practice, it helps you get better and better by the day to the point where whenever I have got those idle moments where I’d want to jot down something Paper is the app I am, almost always, ending up in. But then again, upon watching in YouTube a number of different tutorials about how to make the most out of it, I can only realise I’m just getting started, but I’m loving it! Highly recommended if you would want to venture into the world of doodling and sketching with a superior user experience!

MindNode: And talking about love, I love MindMapping, did I tell you about that before? I think I have been using MindMapping apps for over 10 years, if not longer, and during the course of that time I may have used several dozens of applications in a good number of computing devices, yet, the one single app I keep coming back to is MindNode. It’s, by far, one of my favourite MindMapping apps and while I know I will be talking about a few others over the course of time that may well be worth while checking out, the one I’d recommend using nowadays first would be this one. Most people may not know this, but I usually get to prepare my initial sketches for presentations in MindMaps where I get to develop different ideas, connect them, word them, and then start looking for some kind of order and visuals to go along with them. They are incredibly powerful and when thinking about writing down different ideas or list items there is no better way to make sense out of them all than using a MindMap. It’s one of those essential productivity apps I would definitely recommend everyone to take a look, even for personal use!

CityMapper [iPhone Only]: Whenever I get to travel to a major city (They are currently listing over 200 of them at the moment!, if I recall correctly) and I happen to be lucky enough to be connected either via mobile data or WiFi, CityMapper is one of the main traveling & map apps I use on a regular basis, specially, when I may need to resort to public transport to get out and about in the city. It’s one of the most comprehensive and user friendly traveling apps I have used in years and one that becomes part of the survival kit when going to a major city in order to avoid getting lost. Of course, not all cities are available just yet, but you can either vote for your own city or for other potential candidates which means it keeps getting updated on a regular basis with more city maps. But, again, if you are going to a major city some time soon, and are connected to the Internet via your mobile phone, CityMapper is one huge assistant to help you not get lost in the process! It’s saved me a few times already in the last couple of years and just can’t take it off my iPhone at the moment.

Spotify: I know there are tons of live streaming music services out there, going from Google Play, to Tidal, to SoundCloud or even Apple Music, but the one I keep coming back over and over again has always been Spotify. You see? There are a lot ofthingsI quite like about Spotify itself, including as well the wonderfully inspiring capability of pretty much nailing it in terms of helping you build the playlists you know you’re going to enjoy the most (Discover Weekly, Release Radar and the Daily Mixes are some of my favourites). There are also a lot of things you can stream via Spotify that you may not even have heard about in the past to make it even more useful. It even claims that it knows you better than yourself. But the main reason why I keep coming back to Spotify to livestream music, or listen to it offline, is because the overall user experience is far superior, in all devices, to everything else, helping you focus on what you just want to focus on, i.e. listening to some really good music, versus trying to figure out how the app really works.

And to get all of what you get for the monthly prize of being a premium user, it’s just too tough to beat it. To the point where I eventually resisted the temptation of going elsewhere, as most folks may have done already, and decided to stick around with it. A few months later, still no regrets and loving it as if it was the very first day of listening to unlimited music in your own terms, at your own pace, while enjoying all the benefits. Plus plenty more!

And that’s it! That’s the next round of My Top 5 iOS Apps of the Week. Hope everyone gets to enjoy them and, like I have said in previous blog posts, if there is an app you would want to suggest, recommend I try out, let me know in the comments and I’ll be more than happy to and then report back on how I got along with it and whether it’ll be making it for good in my iOS devices over time. Who knows, there may well be a great chance for that to happen, because you never know what’s going to enhance your own productivity or even make you enjoy your mobile devices just a little tiny bit more!

Last week I didn’t have much of a chance to put together another blog post from the My Top 5 iOS Apps of the Week series, as I was away on a short holiday break to Barcelona, Spain. This time around I decided to keep a low profile, on purpose, in the different media tools I use more or less on a regular basis and remain, for the vast majority of the time, disconnected from the online world. Phew! That surely was a liberating experience, I tell you. I very much enjoyed every single minute of it more than anything else because it was, most probably, the first time in a couple of years I went in the dark without saying anything. I can highly recommend it, for sure!, as the end-result can be quite intriguing and refreshing altogether. Now, that doesn’t mean I wasn’t using my iPhone, nor my iPad Pro, of course, I was still using them more often than not, as I still needed to go out and about, get round different places, get together with real life friends and what not. I suppose that for next time around I will do a bit of an experiment leaving them both behind and see how that would fair along. But that would be the subject for another blog post at some point in time…

Now that I am back home here I am, once more, sharing along the next round of Apps hoping you may find some of them useful as well. Oh, and watch out for a little gift I will be sharing along for one of them at the end of this post…

Thus, without much further ado, here are My Top 5 iOS Apps of the Week – Week #3. Oh, and remember, unless I specify it accordingly, all of these apps are universal in iOS, whether for iPhone or iPad, so you can make your pick as you may see fit:

CityMaps2Go: Before I was going on holidays last week to Barcelona, I briefly mentioned on Twitter how I was very eager to give a try to a new app Google has put together called Google Trips that is supposedly going to fix all of the potential issues with traveling, wether for work or for pleasure. Well, errr, nope! It didn’t do it for me. I downloaded the details for the trip to Barcelona offline, even though I have got 4G on my iPhone / iPad, just to see what it would be like if I were going abroad, and overall I wasn’t convinced by the choices of places offered whether for sightseeing or eat & dine. Overall I thought it was just a bit too over-engineered with very little room for serendipity to kick in, to explore things and places further along, to let yourself get lost to then find yourself again, in short, to improvise. In a nutshell, far too organised for my tasting. Mind you, I may well give it a go though next time around I travel to another city that I may not know from before and see how it would go, but this time around it just didn’t cut it.So I went back to one of my all time favourite maps & traveling apps, CityMaps2Go. It allows me to combine perfectly, a well organised offline map to get around, but also the improvisation of discovering new places wherever I may well be, plus recommendations from real people on what to check out and what not. My favourite capability from the App though is the compass that comes with it that points me back in the right direction in case I get lost heh Oh, and one other activity I love doing with the app is to accumulate all of the various different offline city maps I have used during the course of the year with all the trips I may do and reflect where I have been that year, before I start the new year with a clean slate. Pretty neat, if you ask me.

Human: [iPhone Only] Over the course of the last few years I have made extensive use of a good number of different Exercise & Fitness Apps, such as RunKeeper Pro, Runtastic Pro, Strava, Nike+, RockMyRun, Zova, etc. etc. that I may include in this series in the long run, we shall see, but right now there is only one of them that’s still installed in my iPhone and that is Human. It’s my favourite exercise and fitness app by far, more than anything else, because its main premise is not to put too much strain in your body with the exercise you do, but to remind you, kindly, you need to remain active and a minimum of 30 minutes of activity may well do. I like that!I also like the fact you don’t have to compete with other people, or even with yourself, through the app, so the gamification component is just not there. Yes, I quite like that, indeed! Yes, I know, there is Clubs in the App, but I am not part of any at the moment and there is also Pulse which I never check anyway. And that’s what I really like about the app, because its focus is in the long term activity, not the short bursts of competing with others, till you are bored to death and you move somewhere else. Not my kind of game, I am afraid, which is why I heart Human so much. 30 minutes of daily activity for the rest of your lifetime. That simple. Yes, of course, you can do so much more than that, but, you see?, there is no real competition, just you and your daily healthy activity check. heh

Kindle: Yes, I know, I know, the Kindle App is an obvious one, everyone has it, but I just had to include it as this past holiday week in Barcelona was the perfect opportunity for me to catch up with plenty of reads I have meant to be done with by now, but that they have may dropped out for whatever the reason. I can’t remember the last time I had a paper book in my hands, or that I may have bought one. Ever since the Kindle app came out, I have defaulted to ebooks, in whatever the form or format, and I just love it. Why? Well, because everywhere I may well go, whether work related or not, and for those spare minutes where something needs to happen, but it doesn’t, I take out my iPhone and continue reading where I left it. Oh, yes, the screen of the iPhone 6S Plus does make a difference. A huge difference altogether! (So you can imagine how it would work on my iPad Pro, too!). ‘Oh, what kinds of books are you reading at the moment, by the way?’, you may be wondering, right? Hold on, I will talk about that soon enough when I share the App I’m currently using to store notes / reviews of the books I have read or I am reading at the moment… Yes, there is an app for that, and I would say it’d be totally unexpected for most of you when I share it along in this series at a later time 😀

WiFox: This is probably my favourite new app that I just installed last week and that I am surely looking forward to taking it for a spin on my next business trip I may well do and see how it would play along, but, I tell you, it could well be a game changer for all of the road / air warriors out there. Imagine this, an app that contains all of the WiFi hotspots at airports, and other public spaces, along with their passwords and all of that available for free! My goodness!, my dear WiFox, where have you been all of this time?!?!?! Which world have I have been living myself in for not having found you sooner?!?! Either way, if you are a frequent world traveler and are in clear need of remaining connected at whichever airport you may well be, this app might be the answer to all of our ever growing pains and headaches to continue working online while on the move! Yay!![Of course, I will report back in this post next time around I get a chance to use it to confirm how accurate and helpful it may well be, thus stay tuned!]

Elevate: And, finally, games! Of course! Why not, right? I don’t think I have mentioned it on previous blog entries from this series, but I’m hoping to be able to share as well some of my favourite games that I keep playing over the course of time. There used to be a time where, at one point, I had several dozens of games in my iOS devices, but right now there are only a couple of them that I keep playing every so often and, perhaps, one of my all time favourite ones is Elevate.Despite the growingskepticism and research about the potential benefits of Brain Training apps, I keep enjoying Elevate quite a bit and mainly for three different reasons: a) I am not a native English speaker myself, so plenty of the different games inside the app help me improve my overall English skills around writing, listening, speaking and reading, which I very much appreciate to help me keep up, as I graduated as an English teacher a few years back; b) It also has got a Study section that allows me to improve my overall skills around public speaking, speed reading, math and vocabulary building, which is just perfect for when I have got that spare minute and I’d want to learn or improve on a specific area; c) And, finally, through Performance, it allows me to keep track of my own progress and identify those areas where I’m doing well, and those other areas where I may need to improve a bit, which is just perfect to help me define what my own learning needs may well be at that point in time and act upon them. Just brilliant!

Now, at the beginning of this blog post, I mentioned how I had a little gift for you folks out there who may be interested, in this case, to check out Elevate itself, and more specifically, the Pro version, because I have got the lovely opportunity to share across some promo codes with you all to give the pro version a try for a full week. So if you haven’t tried Elevate just yet, or if you are using the free version and would want to check the full one, leave a comment below or reach out to me on Twitter (@elsua) and I will go ahead and share that promo code across. Happy gaming, happy learning!

And that’s it for today! Hope you folks enjoy this week’s suggestions and favourite iOS Apps from yours truly and if you want to enjoy that little gift to try out Elevate Pro for a full week, reach out to me and I will share it right away!